The Silences of Home

by The Silences of Home (v5. 0) (epub)

  Nara. He misses you so much, and he is too proud to say so. Please come home.

  NINE

  “Ladhra, Dearest Princess, you are the only dream in my heart. You are, to me, a thousand thousand fountains in the desert of my soul; a season of rains where before there was only scalding wind. I beseech you: choose me, when your time comes to pick among the scribes. I am passionate and loyal, and my skills of memory and writing are considerable after all my years of study. I love Luhr and all the growing Queensrealm, but above all, O water of my heart, I love you.”

  The paper fluttered from Ladhra’s fingers to the ground. “Ugh,” she said.

  “I thought it was sweet,” said Lanara. “Ridiculous, but sweet. What’s his name? What’s he like?” Ladhra pursed her lips and peered up into the leaves, and Lanara laughed. “That bad?”

  “He’s always squinting. And he’s covered in pimples and scars that used to be pimples. His name is Baldhron. He follows me around the palace sometimes. And Malhan sees him writing these letters when he’s supposed to be reading dispatches or transcribing the Days of the Fourteenth Queen, or the Eighteenth, or whoever.” Lanara laughed again and Ladhra smiled at her. “It’s so good to see you happy, even just for a moment. Which is why I force you to leave your house every afternoon.”

  Lanara nodded and leaned back against the enormous tree trunk behind them. “I know,” she said. “You’re surprisingly sensitive. And,” she added over Ladhra’s chuckle, “I’m glad of it. If I didn’t have you. . . .” She took a deep breath and smelled wood, ferns, wet sand. Not pus and blood, though these other smells remained, beneath her fingernails and buried in her skin.

  “I wish you would let me help you. My mother could send more doctors so that you wouldn’t need to be there all the time. You’re going to collapse soon, Nara. Or get sick yourself.”

  Even with her eyes closed, Lanara could see the movement of leaves in sunlight. The wind was almost cool. “You know he doesn’t like doctors: you know that. And I don’t like people to see him. Especially people like you, who knew him before.” She opened her eyes and watched the leaves shift against the sky. Grey-green leaves, so high up, so dense that the sky seemed small. “Anyway, it won’t be much longer. It can’t be.”

  “It has already been far too long, my dear. You came back ages ago, and he was sick well before that. He’s being too strong. And so are you.”

  Lanara stood up and stretched. Fingers leaves, arms branches, toes roots, blood sap, ancient and slow. She thought, If only I could have such peace—be here always, firm in the earth. She looked down at Ladhra. “Perhaps. Though we may be more stubborn than strong. And now I must go back to him.”

  Baldhron watched from behind an enormous dusky ash. He dug his fingers into the bark as he listened to Ladhra’s voice, reading his words aloud to her friend Lanara. He tore a purple leaf to pieces as they laughed. He wanted to stride out from the tree’s shadow and make them gasp at the power of his voice and fists—but he stayed still. His desires—all of them—would only be fulfilled with patient vigilance.

  He knew, as soon as Ladhra had returned alone to the palace, that he would have to write to her again, right away. Part of his plan—but also a need whose force still surprised him. He never composed his letters to her in the palace, though he often reflected that there would be a symmetry to this: lies composed in a place of lies. Instead he walked through the corridors that would take him out the palace’s main doors and into the marketplace.

  He remembered now, as always, that the palace had once awed him. He had first seen it at eight years old, his small right hand clasped in the large left one of the Queensman who had taken him away from his home. A squalid, stinking home: a cave in a cliff, always thick with smoke from the cookfire, everything in it coated with ash and salt from the water so far below. His mother had promised him a better place. “Not much longer, Borwold,” she would say, bending over him so that he would hear her above the booming of waves. He had had a different name then. “Be patient, my strong boy. We’ll soon be away, in a fine house with a roof and walls. We’ll never have to dive for them again then.”

  Not that he had minded the diving. She had; he knew this because she told him so, over and over, and because her face, when she launched herself out and down, was always grim. “We’re just animals to them,” he heard her say to the other silvershell-divers. “We court death day after day so that they can gasp and clap and feast on the crabmeat we bring them. They feast! They grow rich off selling meat and shells, while we huddle in filthy holes and eat the scraps they let us keep. Surely they could train birds or clever sea creatures to do this work?”

  Baldhron tried to hate the Queensfolk because his mother did, but it was difficult. She had known life before the Queensfolk traders came to take control of the city’s council; he had not. They praised him when he piled the glinting crabs at their feet. And when he threw himself into the air and heard their shouts of amazement above the wind-shriek in his ears, he felt nothing but joy. He somersaulted and twisted so that they would clap for him, and maybe give him a coin or a crab to keep for himself. As he grew, he dove from higher and higher points on the cliff, too excited to be afraid. “Their applause is not worth dying for,” his mother would cry in her voice that sounded like the screech of a nesting forkbill. “You’ll go in headfirst someday, or lose your mark and land on a rock, and then what would I do?”

  But it was she who had died. She had been feverish the night before, and only seemed to worsen when Baldhron helped her drink more of the watered wine a kind Queensman had given him after a particularly spectacular dive. “And this is for the mother of such a gifted boy,” the man had said, smiling, and Baldhron had borne the bulging skin back to her with pride he could not, this time, conceal. She had drunk a bit, then some more. By midnight she was groaning, burning with fever and a thirst that the rest of the drink, and even fresh water, could not slake. She had lurched to her feet at mid-morning, when the first dive horn sounded, had shaken off Baldhron’s hand. “If I don’t,” she had rasped, “we won’t eat tonight.” She stood, swayed, steadied herself. He leaned out to watch her dive, after the third horn rang from docks to cliff. For a moment it seemed that she would turn and turn again, as always—but she did not. He saw her buck in the air below him, saw her limbs flail and slacken. He went in after her, too quickly for precision, and lost consciousness when the sea closed over his head.

  Queensfolk pulled them both out. Baldhron woke lying on the longest dock, where Queensfolk silk fluttered. His mother was breathing on the wood beside him. She breathed for two days after, in the room they had given her—but at the end of that second day she vomited blood, red gouts that quickly became black, and died. The kind Queensman who had given Baldhron the wine had put a hand on his shoulder, after her body had been removed. “Let me take you away from here,” he had said. “Let me take you to the Queenscity.”

  And so Baldhron had come to the city and its palace, all that time ago, clutching Queensman Senlhan’s hand. His eight-year-old eyes had blinked and stared, almost unable to take in the glow of fountains and jewels. He had been installed in the Scribestower; had soon forgotten his cave. As he learned to put writing stick to parchment and make words, he forgot the burn of wind and water on his skin. He was given a new name by the Queen herself, as proof of his new life; he forgot Borwold, the way it had sounded when his mother had laughed or shouted it. He was a Queensboy who served the wise and noble Queen Galha in her great realm; he forgot his mother.

  He shuddered now, walking the halls that had once dazzled him. It was as if he had two sets of eyes, and saw two layers: one luminous with hope, the other dull and ugly with knowledge. I was such a fool, he thought again, and again this thought led to another: But no more. One day they’ll suffer for their lies. An old vow, but it still made his stomach tighten with desire. He seemed made of desire, these days—many desires, with only one conclusion. “Princess,”
he breathed as he walked toward the well that would lead him away from the palace’s stink.

  It was a long, wet, echoing climb, as always. He took the route he had taken as a boy, the one laid out for him in the first of the anonymous notes that had been pressed into his hand in the marketplace. “Read this,” the woman who had given it to him hissed, “then destroy it.” By the time he had looked up from the folded parchment, the old woman was gone.

  You are Borwold, son of Yednanya, he had read. He was eleven, wandering about the marketplace looking for a coloured writing stick (forbidden in lessons). You are a victim of deceit and should know it. Go to the well in the eastern marketplace. Make sure you are not seen. The words flowed on—tiny, square words, very carefully made. He read the directions they gave. When he re-folded the parchment, his hands were slippery with sweat.

  He was very quick now, sliding over the well’s rim and down into the shaft. He had been clumsier at eleven, had had to wait until the area was deserted before he tried it. But that had been part of the allure, even before he had known what awaited him below: the possibility of discovery, the mad, breathless scramble into the earth.

  He had carried a torch the first time, which had been unwieldy, and which he had had to douse when he reached the bottom. He had since made the downward climb in total darkness. He lingered on the lowest foothold for long enough to ensure that there was a sack of clothes hanging where it should be, flat against the stone, away from the trajectory of the well’s bucket. (On several occasions he had had to fumble for excuses for his dripping clothing, standing in the dazzling sunlight of the marketplace.) Then he filled his lungs and dove.

  You will have to dive, the note had told him. But you, a child of Xelnarzan cliffs, will have no trouble with this—and he had not. His full-grown limbs still exulted in the dive and the brief swim that followed. He liked to imagine, as he kicked away from the shaft’s wall, that he was an arrow. This amused and excited him: an arrow beneath the Queenscity, speeding toward a mark that would someday ruin the Queen. He stroked so powerfully beneath the water that his lungs were hardly aching by the time he touched the rounded entrance to the southern tunnel and thrust his way into the air. He hauled himself up onto the narrow ledge that jutted from the wall and took a few deep breaths before he began to walk.

  You will see torches, his eleven-year-old self had read. Follow them. Lanterns lined the walls now; his followers kept them clean and lit. He glanced up occasionally, though not as often as he once had. The walls that curved beside and above him were inlaid with crystal and other liquid, shining stones: sprays of them, stretched from waterline to ceiling as if thrown by a powerful hand. The hand, in fact, of the Third Queen; Baldhron had discovered this after combing the early Luhran histories for mention of the water system.

  And so the Third Queen sent workmen beneath the city, and they hacked at layers of stone until they had fashioned a network of passages for the water the First had discovered beneath the sand. And when the passages were dug and the water channelled, the Third sent artisans beneath the city, and they fused glass and clear stones into the rock walls, in the shapes of spouts and waves, fish and other wetland beasts. All this was crafted in thanks to the water that gives life to Luhr, and to the great Queen who tapped its power.

  Baldhron had found a scientific mention of the tunnels on a clay tablet dated to the time of the Tenth Queen, and one other, very brief reference:

  Today the Thirteenth Queen determined to visit the underground water chambers built by her ancestor; but there was no easy way to access them, as the Third Queen had not thought to make their wonders public, so it was decided that the visit would not take place.

  It is a secret place, the third, and last, anonymous note had told him. It has been forgotten. Our cause depends on this.

  Baldhron only looked at the walls now to see where he was. The long silver eel . . . the white-tipped wave . . . the school of flatskimmers. . . . When he found the towering braid of fern, he turned left into a smaller tunnel. He was very close. He imagined the houses above him, thinning a bit toward the city wall, and his steps quickened. This tunnel was unadorned. Its walls were red, the hard clay beneath the desert. He touched the wall as he walked. It was bumpy and beaded with damp.

  “Who’s there?” called a voice from the end of the tunnel.

  There had been no voices on that first trip. The only sound had been the rasping of Baldhron’s breath, and the crackling of the parchment clutched in his hand. Now the centre of his realm was guarded by fellow students. They took shifts, standing in the narrow tunnel with water flowing at their feet, holding daggers they were willing to use but had never been required to. Baldhron had not stood guard for two years. This was the Scribesrealm, and he was its ruler.

  “Baldhron!” he called back. Part of him still flinched when he heard or spoke this name of which he had been so proud as an ignorant boy. He had considered changing it, here below the city—but its Queensfolk syllables revolted him, and revulsion made him strong.

  “I didn’t expect—” the guard, Pentaran, stammered. “That is, you don’t customarily visit at this time of day. . . .”

  Fool, Baldhron thought, and walked quickly to the tunnel’s end as Pentaran hastened after him.

  Baldhron always sucked in his breath when he entered this vast, round chamber, even so many years after he had first seen it. Then he had gasped in awe; now the awe was twinned with pride. His chamber: a reservoir whose water lay still and smooth, whose walls arched up beyond sight or lantern light, rippling with cut glass that looked like emeralds and rubies and sapphires. Many of these glass pieces were obscured, smothered by rows and rows of hanging sacks. There had been seventeen of these, suspended from hooks an arm’s reach above his head. He had discovered that each sack contained parchment (some crumbled beyond legibility) and small, cracked stone tablets. The ones furthest from the entry tunnel held pages bound with twine and glue. The note had directed him to the second-furthest sack, but he had opened the closest one first, impatient with excitement.

  I am scribe Drenhan, he had read, peering close to the first scroll he had unrolled very gently, and I betray my Queen as I write—but write I must, for there are lies in this city and this land, and someone must tell truth.

  Baldhron had set the scroll down on the ledge. It had been so limp with damp and age that, once laid flat, its ends barely curled. No, he had thought even as he rose to walk to the second-furthest sack, don’t do this. Leave now. This is a place of lies, and it is treason even to read them. . . .

  He saw the piece of parchment as soon as he opened the sack. One corner torn, some of the red writing-stick markings smudged; the note had told him it would look like this. He had felt nothing but dread, as he plucked it free.

  Yednanya, silvershell-diver of Xelnars, has been poisoned. I was approached with this news by a servant in the Queenshouse here. The servant had overheard a conversation and then glimpsed a written order from Luhr. Queen Galha commanded Yednanya’s murder, for the woman had been attempting to convince the other divers (all desperately poor) to revolt against the city’s Queensfolk council of trade. It was one of these divers who warned the Queensfolk. The diver was rewarded with silver—and Yednanya was poisoned, as Galha instructed, with watered wine given as a gift to her son. The divers have since been quiet and agreeable to the Queensfolk who exploit them. As for the son: his name is Borwold, and he is to be brought to Luhr by Senlhan, the same Queensman who delivered the poison to him. Another grateful, pliant child to do the Queen’s “good work.” Watch him closely.

  Baldhron had read this letter innumerable times since that first one, and the sickness never failed to return to his gut and heart—bile of rage and hurt and fear that had very soon been rage only. He had scrambled back to the well shaft and up; he had run through the marketplace, looking for the old woman who had given him the note. He never saw her again. The next note had been delivered by a hal
f-giant who did not understand the Queenstongue, the third by a boy younger than him who had torn himself from Baldhron’s grip and disappeared into the crowd. My fellow renegade-scribes have dwindled away, this third note said, murdered or afraid or simply old, as I am. But I am not the last of the truth-keepers. You will take our truth and make it yours.

  Thirty-seven sacks lined the Scribesrealm library’s walls now. They stretched along the left-hand walkway nearly to the opposite tunnel entrance. Fresh parchment and writing sticks were stored on a recessed ledge by the bridge that spanned the widest part of the pool. Baldhron’s people used them, people whose names he had found in the sacks, and others—student scribes—whom he had watched and then spoken to, testing them before he revealed his realm to them. Some of them completed their lessons and were made full scribes and dispatched elsewhere in the Queensrealm; they sent messages back, which were labelled and placed in the appropriate bags. (One of these messages read: Queensman Senlhan was stabbed to death at the Queenshouse in Xelnars by a “thief” who will never be found. . . .) None of Baldhron’s people had ever betrayed him. He liked to think that this was simply because of the strength of his knowledge, and his charisma, but it was also thanks to the care he had taken in selecting them. When he had discovered people in Luhr whose families were mentioned in the sacks of the Scribesrealm, he watched them, spoke to them frequently, casually, before he revealed his purpose. Some of these people proved unworthy of the Scribesrealm, or unready for it. Some, like Ladhra’s friend Lanara.

  A palace serving girl has confirmed that Salanne, Galha’s dearest friend, has met several times with consort-scribe Malhan, late at night when the Queen has been sleeping. It will not be long before Galha discovers this deception.